The Club(67)
According to Detective Superintendent Neil Forsyte, the Senior Investigating Officer assigned by Essex Police to the investigation, in a statement seemingly designed to quell some of the wilder theories doing the rounds, there was absolutely nothing else in Ned Groom’s inbox or sent messages that offered any clue as to why he might have wanted to leave the island so suddenly, who he might have been going to meet, where he might have arranged to meet them, or even how he intended getting to the mainland.
That Friday night was clear and calm. The party had gone off without a hitch. Ned was not, according to eyewitnesses, visibly intoxicated when last seen – as one Island Home barman said off the record: ‘We’d served him a few drinks – he had been at a party – but I’ve never seen Ned anything less than totally in control.’
The Home Group – and their lawyers – have been swift to respond to rumours that the company was in any kind of financial difficulty, or that large sums of money have since been discovered missing from company accounts.
There is no indication that Ned Groom might have had reason to attempt self-harm, nor did anyone report seeing him acting upset or out of character in the days leading up to his disappearance. ‘He was,’ wrote Annie Spark in the short statement still up on Home’s official Instagram feed, ‘a brilliant man at the apex of his career. An innovator, a disruptor, a visionary. A tastemaker, a rule breaker. A man always looking to the future, to the next challenge, the next adventure.’
His body was recovered from the sea thirteen miles east of the island, seven days from the date of his disappearance. According to the crew of the fishing vessel that hauled the grim discovery onto their deck, it was his shirt they spotted, ballooning on the surface of the water – at first, one crew member said they took it to be ‘an old white plastic bag’.
The temperature of the North Sea probably prevented the body from surfacing earlier. It had likely spent some time on the bottom before bloating and rising, drifting with the tides and currents to the location it was discovered. Even though bodies recovered from water within a week are generally not in an advanced stage of decomposition, confirming the exact cause of death with any degree of certainty is often impossible. It was noted in the post-mortem that there was no obvious sign of physical injury, save those inflicted by the fishing nets used to bring the body in. With no broken bones, it is extremely unlikely, despite the persistent online rumours, that he was at any stage thrown or jettisoned into the ocean from a helicopter. The subsequent inquest delivered an open verdict.
Whether he was alive or dead, conscious or in some way incapacitated when it happened, the findings of the autopsy suggested it was likely that Ned Groom entered the waters of the North Sea at some point in the early hours of Saturday morning – the contents of his stomach revealed the fillet steak served on Friday night, suggesting that he died after the party but before he consumed a substantial meal (his usual breakfast was an eggs Florentine) the next day. All of which makes that single email even more puzzling. The tense, after all, suggests the sender has already left the island. If Ned Groom did so, no one has yet come up with a completely plausible explanation of how – nor, if he had hoped to convince his brother and his PA that he had left the island when he had not, why that might be.
It is easy, as Freddie Hunter says, to let the events on Island Home turn us into armchair detectives. To plough doggedly through the newspaper long reads, listen to podcasts with all the glib clichés of true crime reports, and let such cheap little tricks of familiarity prompt us to treat the whole thing as light entertainment. It is perhaps harder to put ourselves in the shoes of Ned Groom’s elderly parents, seventy-nine and eighty-four, driven from their home in Wiltshire to a morgue in Maldon to identify the body of their eldest son after a week in the water, warned in advance of the kinds of effects on the skin, on the flesh, that a length of time immersed in saltwater has, told about the damage done by crabs, fish and sea lice to any edible object that has spent any length of time on the seabed. Confirming that yes, they did still want to see him, even in that terrible state. Shown a Rolex the body had still been wearing and asked if that object is familiar. Given a moment to prepare themselves, a moment spent already imagining what is behind that curtain, gripping tightly to their partner’s hand. Being shown a lifeless, mottled, waxy object on a gurney and being asked: Is this your son? Being asked that question and nodding yes.
Then imagine having to go through that process twice.
Chapter Eight
Saturday Night
Nikki
The unfamiliar sensation of her phone sitting still and silent in her pocket unnerved Nikki.
On any other day, it would have been buzzing with Ned’s constant requests and everyone else asking for five minutes with the boss. But, with all their attention focused on the members, Ned’s absence had gone almost unremarked among the staff.
Still, every hundred metres or so, from sheer force of habit, Nikki pulled it out of her pocket to check for messages. 5.32 p.m. Nothing. 5.52 p.m. Still nothing. It would be dark soon and she should get back to her cabin to dress for dinner.
Nikki had chosen the quieter side of the island for a walk, where the staff accommodation was located alongside the ugly concrete jetty that took delivery of supplies by boat. Feet sinking with each step into the shingle, hood up over her head against the drizzle, she felt a strange sort of calm staring out to sea. Up ahead, there was a small collection of pre-Home beach huts that Ned hadn’t bothered to demolish because nobody important would see them, clumps of tall grass that shivered in the wind coming off the water.